Morale Down, Federal Workforce Gets Ready For A New Boss

So the take-home pay that you are expecting is actually quite a bit less."Hooper says that hiring and pay freezes, the elimination of employee recognition programs and the elimination of tuition reimbursement programs "all together make a very poor situation for staff." Convincing someone to work for the federal government can be "a tough sell," says Traci DiMartini, who is the chief human capital officer at the General Services Administration. "For that, we received over 66,000 applications, which means we're only hiring 2% of the people that applied," DiMartini says.Across the whole federal government, according to the Office of Personnel Management, there were more than 18 million applicants for some 331,000 federal job postings this year.OPM spokeswoman Rachel Tripp said in a statement to NPR: "Because of the President's vision, the swamp is actively being drained and in doing so, Americans around the country — outside of Washington, DC — who would never have had the chance to serve in the Federal Government now do."The majority of federal jobs are, however, are already located outside Washington, D.C. At the GSA, DiMartini says agencies like hers are trying to find new ways of reaching out to prospective employees through social media platforms, including LinkedIn and Facebook.